Tag: Sheffield Wednesday

There seems to be an inherent contradiction at the heart of the Football League Championship play-off final. In the hours and days building up to the match, commentators are very quick to tell us just how much a place in the Premier League will be worth to the winners. A combination of the continuing upward spike in the value of contract revenues and the apparently infinite capacity of broadcasters to over-hype whatever is put in front of them has ensured this, and there is an entertaining game to be had in guessing what the most outrageously over the top...

In both the league and the FA Cup, the 1950s were not especially kind to football on Merseyside. Everton were relegated to the Second Division for only the second – and, to date, the last – time in the club’s history in 1951, and their promotion back three years later coincided with Liverpool getting relegated, meaning that the only Merseyside Derby match played between January 1951 and 1962 came when the two clubs were drawn against each other in the Fourth Round of the FA Cup in 1955. By the middle of the following decade, however, Liverpool had been...

Sheffield Wednesday travel to Molineux this weekend to play a mid-table Wolverhampton Wanderers team having already booked a place in the Football League Championship play-offs with a game to spare. It’s been a long time – sixteen years – since the club was last in the Premier League, a spell even longer than their last break between top flight appearances, which ran from 1970 until 1984, and our video this morning comes from towards the end of one of their previous stays in the First Division. At the end of September 1967, Wednesday were riding something of the crest...

Tomorrow night, Brighton & Hove Albion play Sheffield Wednesday at The Amex Community Stadium as they seek to continue a push for a Premier League place which has sparked back into life over the last couple of weeks after starting to look as if it had come of the rails. Thirty-three years ago, however, these same two clubs were meeting with a slightly different set of circumstances. The 1982/83 season had seen Jimmy Melia take over as the manager of Brighton & Hove Albion. For all of his team’s struggling in the First Division – they would be relegated...

As a result of having a contract with the Football League to show highlights, broadcasters used to have to give a little starring space to the lower divisions. Both the BBC and ITV were obliged to show a handful of lower division matches per season, giving them star billing over and above what was happening at the top of the First Division. For Football League clubs, this meant that they would usually end up on the television once a season, as the local television broadcasters looked around to fill a contractual for the season, even if that one did...